Movies you've seen recently (Part 1)

Cafe Society
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The one thing I didn’t like was how the bathroom filled with water. Not likely. And it would take a loooooong time. I enjoyed it as a fairy tale for adults, and I loved the look of it.

I just watched Secret Ceremony with Elizabeth Taylor and Mia Farrow. Weird and weirdly fascinating. Probably too much for its time. It was funny to read how it was bowdlerized when it was first broadcast by NBC. Good performances, especially by Taylor. It was a risky role for her, and I thought it was a success. Oh, and Peggy Ashcroft was unrecognizable to me. Robert Mitchum was the worst. First, I think he was supposed to be a Brit, but he made almost no effort to sound or act like one.

But I’ve also had a “crush” on Debenham House since seeing it two different Agatha Christie stories. The interiors were almost all filmed there. Quite a house.

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The Northman - Basically the retelling of a Norse legend that was the inspiration for Hamlet. Good cast.

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent - Also kind of screwball buddy comedy/drama with Nicolas Cage and Pedro Pascal.

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Hmm, I saw Terrifier 2 today and thought exactly the opposite. I thought the first one was pretty bad. The gore scenes were good but the acting of all the victims was terrible and there was barely any introduction to the characters before they started getting killed. It seemed like a cheesy bad b-movie with great special effects.

Because of that I was pretty wary of seeing the sequel. The first one felt long at 90 mins, I didn’t think I could stand 2 hours and 15 mins of the same stuff! Luckily I was very wrong. The longer run time actually gives the film the chance to have character development and the actors are way better. We get one of the better Final Girls I’ve seen in a while. And the gore scenes are outstanding. Way more intense than the first one. I love that it’s all practical effects, no CGI. And I just read today that the whole budget for the film was just $250,000 which is incredible. You can’t make anything for that little, let alone something as professional looking as this.

This is not a mainstream horror by any means, you have to be a fan of extreme gore films, but if you are it was surprisingly quite good!

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I do agree that if they really didn’t spend more than that, it was very impressive. I rarely see a movie that costs that little and while you can tell he doesn’t have the highest quality camera equipment, it does work very much like a full studio movie. I’m impressed with those effects as well.

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Montana Story – 2021 – Showtime - ★★★1/2 out of ★★★★★ – A beautifully shot drama that takes place in, you guessed it, Montana. The cast are a bunch of (to me) unknowns who all provide fine performances. It is about a pair of estranged half-siblings who reunite because their father is dying. The reasons for their estrangement – from each other and from their father - are not hard to predict but are effectively presented.

Don’t Look Back – 1967 – Showtime - ★★★★1/2 – A documentary of 23-year-old Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. Very fun to see not only the performances but also the back stage and limo ride conversations. Maybe only for fans, though. Also features Donovan and Joan Baez.

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Allied 2016 Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard

Great War thriller. Starts with a lot of tension. The pace accelerates mid way through. PItt didn’t have a strong connection to his costar. I find that typical with him and women. He’s always detached i know he was a screen heart-throb but I rarely see much romantic feelings in his work.

I would have preferred seeing the spy at the end arrested and questioned. But, this was a real war story told later by older relatives. That’s how they ended tbe story.

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I just rewatched Forbidden Planet and it does hold up. I think the “tonalities” created by the Barrons were great. For me, one special moment was the electronic bellowing of the monster, which scared me when I was a kid! The sound really made the film, emphasizing how alien the world and scenario were. A standard soundtrack just wouldn’t do the trick.

When the monster became visible, suddenly I thought it looked vaguely like Morbius! After checking it against head shots of him in the film, I decided it was so vague there was nothing to it. However, in the DVD extras, there’s a video with deleted scenes. It also shows early conceptions of various parts of the movie. I was astounded to see among the early sketches of the monster was one that actually WAS the head of Morbius!

The video’s on Youtube.

Obviously, actually using that one would reveal the climax of the movie much too early. But did it influence the final design? Did the animator see it and actually have it in mind? If so, did he consciously put it there? Of course, there’s no hard evidence for any of that.

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All Quiet on the Western Front, 2022 (Netflix).

Definitely worth seeing, especially for Remarque fans and WW1 buffs.

I think one of the hardest things a movie especially historical movies, have to portray is mental unpreparedness (is that a word?) Too many times, movie characters act as if they’ve seen this movie before. Which is OK if it’s Ticket to Paradise or other popcorn/date films.

But imagine going to the Western Front in 1915, having never, ever, seen a war movie. Which, of course, was the case… for the soldiers, the generals, the civilians… man, no wonder psychological health came to the fore in WW1. Take a man from a farm, where he has lived in a 5 mile radius his entire life, and throw him into the mechanized hell of Verdun… no wonder the thousand-yard stare became a thing.

This film did pretty good at showing this. Of course, it follows educated teenagers so the shift wasn’t as large as described above, and, of course, Remarque was more interested in other themes, but this film didn’t ignore the mental strains of just the insanity of it all. But for some reason, this movie triggered in me some wonderment about what it would be like to go to Flanders fields or Verdun or the Somme having zero comprehension about what you’re headed into.

On the other hand, the movie failed where most, if not all movies fail: the depiction of odors. You walk into a room of dead bodies, you’re covering your damned noses, people. Amazes me how many times obviously smelly situations are just ignored - crack houses stink! Murder scenes smell! And rooms full of gassed, dead soldiers are f-in odorous!

Fucking-A, at least wrinkle your noses, guys. That’s why they call it acting!

Anyway, feeling generous, will give it 4.5 stars of 5.

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This is The End, 2013, Netflix

The more I see this Seth Rogan comedy, the more I wonder if it is not stupid-smart. The scene with Seth and Jay in the convenience store is, imho, the best depiction of the absolute bonkery such an event would be. From the lights to the air conditioner to the exploding planes to them entering Franco’s house to find nothing changed… it felt real in a way that many similar scenes in dozens of movies did not.

Too many dick jokes for my tastes, but the line “Hermione came in here and jacked all our shit” is a classic in any language.

3.5 stars, and rising

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I agree - on the surface it’s a stupid immature laddish comedy but it actually kind of works because underneath it all is a knowing wink-wink sensibility and an acknowledgement that they’re all basically sending themselves up. It’s not always an approach that works but it works here.

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I watched it again with a friend a few years ago and agree, for a 1956 sf movie it still holds up remarkably well (although it’s hard to see Leslie Nielsen in a role like that and not expect him to start telling deadpan jokes any minute). It’s easy to see how Roddenberry and the early Star Trek were inspired by the film.

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Speak of the devil…I just watched Spider Baby yesterday. Very low budget lower-than-a-B movie. But I actually watched the whole thing. It had a certain hypnotic quality. Oh, and the actor who played Ralph looked like a twin for one of my neighbors.

I hated The End of the World. I didn’t find it funny or winky-smart or anything but annoying and stupid. Seth Rogan movies are not for me.

I also watched The Secret Partner yesterday. A robbery at a shipping company with one of the company men under suspicion. Other than the annoying soundtrack (lots of 60s horns at full volume that detracted rather than complementing the action), I like it a lot. On the surface, it didn’t look like the kind of movie I’d like, but it had a certain flair with a nice twist. Well acted. Smart criminals and smart cops make for good movies.

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Rewatched this for Halloween, still love it.

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Watched Sleepwalkers from 1992ish? Only for one reason…

But this was a Stephen King story and he even has a cameo.

Utter shit. Complete and Total. Shame on you, Steve! And whoever was involved with making that crap.

Still love you, Mad…

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I was looking for a spooky show to watch last night (Halloween). I found Crimson Peak (2015) on Netflix. I had never heard of it, but it had some fairly big stars in it - Jessica Chastain, Tom Hiddleston & Charlie Hunnam. It was actually pretty good. Very reminiscent of an old black and white gothic. There was something in the way it was filmed - the colors were different. I enjoyed it. It was just the right amount of creepy for a Halloween night!

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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (Prime, 2022) - I could only manage 45 min. I enjoy many of Cage’s films: Raising Arizona, Matchstick Men and Leaving Las Vegas are among my favorite films of all time. I even get the joke, I just found this tedious. I was stuck on a plane during this and still had better things to do.

This thread is a great resource, I read every review written here and you guys have pointed me to fantastic films I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. So this time I had to chime in with a rare clunker for anyone else who thinks like me.

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The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent

I have to say that I enjoyed it. I think Nick Cage can be very funny. I guess he’s proven that over the year, but it wasn’t always intentional. . . at least, I don’t think it was.

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I found the first half better than the second half, which descended into farce (ok, it was intentional, but it just didn’t do it for me), so you probably made the right choice if you weren’t enjoying it at that point!

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No Time To Die, the final Daniel Craig Bond movie. Pretty good action flick, with several nods to past Bond actors and memes (“shaken, not stirred”). Available “free” on Amazon Prime.

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Falling (2020), Viggo Mortensen’s directorial debut about a family dealing with the (grand)father’s descent into dementia. With that brief description alone, most of you will know whether or not you want to see it. If I were dealing with something like that at home, I sure wouldn’t want to see a film about it. In fact, I usually avoid films that I know are going to dwell on the unpleasant, although that’s a very broad statement that will largely depend on the subject matter and how it’s handled. Anyway, I decided to watch this one because of the characteristically high artistic quality of Mortensen’s career, and I liked it so much that I wouldn’t mind watching it again sometime soon, which I can’t say about many other gritty films that I’ve “enjoyed.” Highly entertaining on every level, especially if you like watching talented actors do their thing. The story moves back and forth between the past and present, and several of the characters are portrayed by two actors. In the case of the (grand)father, the actors are Lance Henriksen as the old man and Sverrir Gudnason in his youth, both of whom do a superb job. Really, some of the finest acting I’ve seen in a long time. Check it out if you’re even a little bit interested and rest assured that it’s not overly morbid.